@Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended - A Review

This is my pond!

I'm very proud of my pond. I dug it out all by myself. I built the waterfall and laid all of the stone. It has been a labor of love that I can enjoy and work on over the entire summer. I wanted to share the picture with all of you and I wanted to let everyone know that this was my pond. There was a very easy way to do that.

I got my hands on the Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Master Collection and will be playing around with all of the different parts of it during the course of summer. I decided to start with Photoshop because it is the program I am most familiar with using. Having said that, I am terrible at Photoshop. I base that on the fact that I have hard time making things look the way I want them to. However, I was surprised to find the 5.5 version to be easier that I remembered.

I thought it would be fun to alter the picture above to see what I could do with the program. First, I wanted to get rid of the stone flower in the lower right hand corner.

 

My Pond without the stone.

It was a very simple process and was happy with what I was able to create. I wanted to try something a bit more complicated, so I decided to try and copy and paste some tougher images from the pond. I thought the beavers on the left side of the pond would be fun to clone and move around.

My Pond with the Beavers on the waterfall and to the right of the falls.

Piece of cake! I had no problem taking the beavers and moving them to the top of the waterfall and to the right of the waterfall as well. They blend in very nicely and did not have to do any crazy techniques to accomplish this task. I just highlighted, copied, pasted and dragged to where I wanted them. I couldn't have been happier with the ease of this minor project. I can't wait to start using this for some invitations and website design.

How I plan to use this at school:
I was co-adviser to the school's first online newspaper, The Tower Pulse. In our first year, we were awarded a Silver at the state journalism competition. A silver is the third level of award at the conference. We were complimented on many different parts of The Pulse, but we had room for improvement.

One of the areas that really held us back from receiving the highest honor was our multimedia. We needed more images and video.Since this was our first year, we did not have the resources at our disposal that we would have liked. I was able to secure funding for a Mac, but we lacked solid photo editing software. The Tower had Photoshop at their disposal, but they ran their work on PC and we had a Mac. Students would work on PCs to get the images they wanted, then come up stairs to work on the site with the Mac. It was a tough process for the kids.

Now, with the Master Suite, I'm excited to see what the kids can create with this, and the other Adobe products. I saw what the students were able to create on the PC using an older version of Adobe Photoshop and was blown away. I cannot wait to get the kids in front of the Mac with the newest version and have them teach me a thing or two about photo editing.

Personally, I will continue to play with Photoshop because it is very user friendly and I can have some fun with pictures of my baby boy. If you are looking at getting photo editing software, Photoshop will not disappoint at all. I highly recommend Adobe Photoshop Extended CS5.